American biochemist and Nobel laureate who played a major role in deciphering
the genetic code. He demonstrated that, with the exception of "nonsense
codons," each possible triplet (called a codon) of four different kinds of
nitrogen-containing bases found in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and, in some
viruses, in ribonucleic acid (RNA) ultimately causes the incorporation of a
specific amino acid into a cell protein.
Nirenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1957, and that
year joined the staff of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. His
research earned him the National Medal of Science in 1965 and the Nobel Prize
for Physiology or Medicine in 1968, which he shared with Robert William Holley
and Har Gobind Khorana, whose work, like Nirenberg's, helped to show how genetic
instructions in the cell nucleus control the composition of proteins.
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Jerry Jacob